Editing Kit Carson (section)

== Reputation ==
In 1950, professor [[Henry Nash Smith]] published his classic ''Virgin Land, the American West as Symbol and Myth''. A new type of study, one that looked at literature to understand the general public's view of the frontier, and its creation myth and symbols. To Smith, Carson represented the symbolic mountain man image created first in the novels of [[James Fenimore Cooper]]'s ''[[Leatherstocking Tales]]'', the pathfinder who went into the wilderness as advance pioneer for civilization. Smith details the creation of mythic Carson as a national hero, as well as "Indian fighter, the daredevil horseman, the slayer of grizzly bears, the ancestor of the hundreds of two-gun men who came later decades to people the Beadle [[dime novels]]".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Smith |first1=Henry |title=Virgin Land, The American West as Symbol and Myth |date=1970 |publisher=Harvard University Press |location=Cambridge, Massachusetts |isbn=0-674-93955-7 |page=86}}</ref> Other writers defined two distinct Carsons portrayed in nineteenth century literature, of myth vs. reality.<ref name="Slotkin" /> During the first half of the twentieth century, the general public put those beliefs in the mythic Carson into popular actions by erecting monuments and statues, holding public celebrations, and supporting early movies and television.

The 1970 publication of [[Dee Brown (writer)|Dee Brown]]'s best-selling ''[[Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee]]'' opened the eyes of the reading public to the tragic history of Native Americans which spurred a revaluation of the role of Carson in the Navajo wars. Over the last fifty years, echoing Brown, other writers, fiction and nonfiction, have split the mythic tale from Henry Nash Smith's Carson as symbol of America's heroic narrative of opening the West to create that of Carson as symbol for how the nation mistreated its indigenous peoples.{{citation needed|date=September 2024}}

In 1973, during the annual Taos Fiesta, protesters declared that Carson should be stripped of historical honors, his grave at Taos threatened with exhumation, and the renaming of Kit Carson State Park was demanded.<ref>{{cite news |title=Taos News |date=June 26, 2014}}</ref> Taos led in reconsideration, in a public forum, as to whether Carson was the hero of old or a "blood thirsty imperialist". To one group represented, the American Indian Movement, Carson was responsible for the murder, or genocide of Native Americans. A subsequent history symposium, in 1993 in Taos, tried to enlighten and explain the frontiersman, to air various views. The Navajo were invited, but refused to attend. Voicing one extreme view, an anthropologist remarked, "It's like trying to rehabilitate [[Adolf Hitler]]."<ref>{{cite news |title=Santa Fe Reporter |date=June 30, 1993}}</ref><ref>Roberts 292–295</ref>

New Mexico historian Marc Simmons published a piece that was presented at the 1993 conference. He started with the history of vandalizing of Carson related sites, the painting of a black swastika on his grave and the scratching of the word "killer" on a nearby marker, of the defacing of the Kit Carson monument in Santa Fe. He related how a young professor at Colorado College was successful in demanding that a period photograph of Carson be removed from the ROTC office; how a tourist told a journalist at the Carson home in Taos, "I will not go into the home of that racist, genocidal killer."; and a Navajo at a trading post said, "No one here will talk about Kit Carson. He was a butcher." Other examples were presented, then Simmons followed with a brief explanation of Carson and his times, a theme expanded by Tom Dunlay in, what Simmons calls a magisterial, balanced treatment of the world of ''Kit Carson & the Indians'' (2000).<ref>{{cite book |editor1-last=Gordon-McCutchan |editor1-first=R |title=Kit Carson, Indian Fighter or Indian Killer |date=1996 |publisher=University Press of Colorado |location=Niwot, Colorado |isbn=0-87081-393-5 |pages=73–90}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Simmons |first1=Marc |title=Book Review |journal=New Mexico Historical Review |date=January 2001 |pages=83–86}}</ref>

In the early twenty-first century, best-selling writers [[Hampton Sides]] and David Roberts have reappraised the Carson reputation in their works, and have explained the complex image of Carson. While a heroic image or reputation of Carson is expressed in the earlier, 1968, biography by Harvey Carter, the older narrative has been revised by both Sides and Roberts: In 1968, Carter stated, "In respect to his actual exploits and his actual character, however, Carson was not overrated. If history has to single out one person from among the Mountain Men to receive the admiration of later generations, Carson is the best choice. He had far more of the good qualities and fewer of the bad qualities than anyone else in that varied lot of individuals."<ref>Carter 210</ref> In 2000, David Roberts wrote, "Carson's trajectory, over three and a half decades, from thoughtless killer of Apaches and Blackfeet to defender and champion of the Utes, marks him out as one of the few frontiersmen whose change of heart toward the Indians, born not of missionary theory but of first-hand experience, can serve as an exemplar for the more enlightened policies that sporadically gained the day in the twentieth century."<ref>Roberts 294</ref> In 2006, Sides said that Carson believed the Native Americans needed reservations as a way of physically separating and shielding them from white hostility and white culture. He is said to have viewed the raids on white settlements as driven by desperation, "committed from absolute necessity when in a starving condition". Indian hunting grounds were disappearing as waves of white settlers filled the region.<ref>Sides 334</ref>

A final statement from biographer Roberts in 2000 was "the fate in recent years of Kit Carson's reputation makes for a more perverse lesson in the vicissitudes of fame."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Roberts |first1=David |title=A Newer World, Kit Carson, John C Fremont, and the Claiming of the American West |date=2000 |publisher=Simon and Schuster |location=New York City, New York |isbn=0-684-83482-0 |page=292}}</ref>